It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, October 02, 2024
Bottlenose dolphins “smile” at each other while playing
Dolphins are extremely playful, but little is known about how they—and other marine mammals—communicate during playtime. New research publishing October 2 in the Cell Press journal iScience shows that bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncates) use the “open mouth” facial expression—analogous to a smile—to communicate during social play. The dolphins almost always use the facial expression when they are in their playmate’s field of view, and when playmates perceived a “smile,” they responded in kind 33% of the time.
“We’ve uncovered the presence of a distinct facial display, the open mouth, in bottlenose dolphins, and we showed that dolphins are also able to mirror others’ facial expression,” says senior author and evolutionary biologist Elisabetta Palagi (@bettapalagi) of the University of Pisa. “Open-mouth signals and rapid mimicry appear repeatedly across the mammal family tree, which suggests that visual communication has played a crucial role in shaping complex social interactions, not only in dolphins but in many species over time.”
Dolphin play can include acrobatics, surfing, playing with objects, chasing, and playfighting, and it’s important that these activities aren’t misinterpreted as aggression. Other mammals use facial expressions to communicate playfulness, but whether marine mammals also use facial expressions to signal playtime hasn’t been previously explored.
“The open mouth gesture likely evolved from the biting action, breaking down the biting sequence to leave only the ‘intention to bite’ without contact,” says Palagi. “The relaxed open mouth, seen in social carnivores, monkeys’ play faces, and even human laughter, is a universal sign of playfulness, helping animals—and us—signal fun and avoid conflict.”
To investigate whether dolphins visually communicate playfulness, the researchers recorded captive bottlenose dolphins while they were playing in pairs and while they were playing freely with their human trainers.
They showed that dolphins frequently use the open mouth expression when playing with other dolphins, but they don’t seem to use it when playing with humans or when they’re playing by themselves. While only one open mouth event was recorded during solitary play, the researchers recorded a total of 1,288 open mouth events during social play sessions, and 92% of these events occurred during dolphin-dolphin play sessions. Dolphins were also more likely to assume the open mouth expression when their faces were in the field of view of their playmate—89% of recorded open mouth expressions were emitted in this context—and when this “smile” was perceived, the playmate smiled back 33% of the time.
“Some may argue that dolphins are merely mimicking each other’s open mouth expressions by chance, given they’re often involved in the same activity or context, but this doesn’t explain why the probability of mimicking another dolphin’s open mouth within 1 second is 13 times higher when the receiver actually sees the original expression,” says Palagi. “This rate of mimicry in dolphins is consistent with what’s been observed in certain carnivores, such as meerkats and sun bears.”
The researchers didn’t record the dolphins’ acoustic signals during playtime, and they say that future studies should investigate the possible role of vocalizations and tactile signals during playful interactions.
“Future research should dive into eye-tracking to explore how dolphins see their world and utilize acoustic signals in their multimodal communication during play,” says corresponding author and zoologist Livio Favaro (@LivioF_80). “Dolphins have developed one of the most intricate vocal systems in the animal world, but sound can also expose them to predators or eavesdroppers. When dolphins play together, a mix of whistling and visual cues helps them cooperate and achieve goals, a strategy particularly useful during social play when they’re less on guard for predators.”
iScience (@iScience_CP) is an open access journal from Cell Press that provides a platform for original research and interdisciplinary thinking in the life, physical, and earth sciences. The primary criterion for publication in iScience is a significant contribution to a relevant field combined with robust results and underlying methodology. Visit https://www.cell.com/iscience. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.
Smiling underwater: exploring playful signals and rapid mimicry in bottlenose dolphins
Article Publication Date
2-Oct-2024
Most tropical lightning storms are radioactive
New observations from a retrofitted U2 spy plane reveal a surprising amount and variety of gamma radiation is produced in large tropical thunderstorms
Duke University
DURHAM, N.C. – In the 1990s, NASA satellites built to spot high-energy particles coming from supernovas and other celestial-sized objects discovered a surprise — high energy gamma radiation bursts coming from right here on Earth.
While it didn’t take long for researchers to figure out that these radioactive supercharged particles were coming from thunderstorms, how commonly the phenomenon happened remained a mystery. Satellites weren’t built to find gamma radiation coming from Earth, and they had to be in just the right place at just the right time to do so.
After years of making do with platforms not ideal for the task, a group of scientists secured an opportunity to fly a retrofitted U2 spy plane owned by NASA over storms to take a proper look. In two new papers published October 3 in Nature, the team discovered that gamma radiation produced in thunderstorms is far more common than anyone thought and that the dynamics creating the radiation hold a treasure trove of mysteries yet to be solved.
“There is way more going on in thunderstorms than we ever imagined,” said Steve Cummer, the William H. Younger Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Duke University, who was a coauthor on both papers. “As it turns out, essentially all big thunderstorms generate gamma rays all day long in many different forms.”
The general physics behind how thunderstorms create high-energy flashes of gamma radiation is not a mystery. As thunderstorms develop, swirling drafts drive water droplets, hail and ice into a mixture that creates an electric charge much like rubbing a balloon on your shirt. Positively charged particles end up at the top of the storm while negatively charged particles drop to the bottom, creating an enormous electric field that can be as strong as 100 million AA batteries stacked end-to-end.
When other charged particles — such as electrons — find themselves in such a strong field, they accelerate. If they accelerate to high enough speeds and happen to strike an air molecule, they knock off more high-energy electrons. The process cascades until the collisions have enough energy to create nuclear reactions, producing extremely strong and extremely fast flashes of gamma rays, antimatter and other forms of radiation.
But that’s not the end of the thunderstorm gamma radiation story. Aircraft flying close to thunderstorms have also seen a faint glow of gamma radiation coming from clouds. These storms seem to have enough energy to produce a low-level simmering of gamma radiation, but something prevents it from creating an explosive burst like a popping corn kernel.
“A few aircraft campaigns tried to figure out if these phenomena were common or not, but there were mixed results, and several campaigns over the United States didn’t find any gamma radiation at all,” Cummer said. “This project was designed to address these questions once and for all.”
The research group secured the use of a NASA ER-2 High-Altitude Airborne Science Aircraft. A retrofitted U2 spy plane left over from the Cold War, it flies over twice as high as commercial aircraft and about three miles above most thunderstorms. It’s also extremely fast, giving the team the opportunity to pick the exact thunderstorms they thought were most likely to produce results.
“The ER-2 aircraft would be the ultimate observing platform for gamma-rays from thunderclouds,” said Nikolai Østgaard, professor of space physics at the University of Bergen in Norway and lead investigator of the project. “Flying at 20 km [12.4 miles], we can fly directly over the cloud top, as close as possible to the gamma-ray source.”
Because the ER-2 was the perfect solution and the team was going to fly over the right storms, the researchers figured that if these phenomena were rare, then they’d barely see any at all. But if they were common, then they’d see a lot.
And they saw a lot.
Over the course of a month, the ER-2 flew 10 flights over large storms in the tropics south of Florida, and 9 of them yielded observations of this simmer of gamma radiation, which was also more dynamic than expected.
“The dynamics of gamma-glowing thunderclouds starkly contradicts the former quasi-stationary picture of glows, and rather resembles that of a huge gamma-glowing boiling pot both in pattern and behavior,” said Martino Marisaldi, professor of physics and technology at the University of Bergen.
Given the size of a typical thunderstorm in the tropics, which get much larger than storms at other latitudes, this suggests that more than half of all thunderstorms in the tropics are radioactive. The researchers postulate that this low-level production of gamma radiation acts like steam boiling off a pot of water and limits how much energy can be built up inside.
The researchers were equally excited to see numerous examples of short duration and intense gamma radiation bursts coming from the same thunderstorms. Some of these were precisely like those that were originally detected by the NASA satellites. These almost always occurred in conjunction with an active lightning discharge. This suggests that the large electric field created by lightning is likely supercharging the already high-energy electrons, enabling them to create high-energy nuclear reactions.
But there were also at least two other types of short gamma radiation bursts that had never been seen before. One type is incredibly short, less than a thousandth of a second, while the other is a sequence of about 10 individual bursts that repeat over the course of about a tenth of a second.
“Those two new forms of gamma radiation are what I find most interesting,” Cummer said. “They don’t seem to be associated with developing lightning flashes. They emerge spontaneously somehow. There are hints in the data that they may actually be linked to the processes that initiate lightning flashes, which are still a mystery to scientists.”
If there is anybody out there worried about getting turned into the Hulk by all of this gamma radiation, Cummer added, they shouldn’t be. The amount of radiation being produced would only be dangerous if a person or object were quite close to the origination source.
“The radiation would be the least of your problems if you found yourself there. Airplanes avoid flying in active thunderstorm cores due to the extreme turbulence and winds,” Cummer said. “Even knowing what we now know, I don’t worry about flying any more than I used to.”
This research was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 320839 and the Research Council of Norway under contracts 223252/F50 (CoE) and contract 325582.
CITATIONS: Østgaard N., Mezentsev A., Marisaldi M., Grove J. E., Quick M., et al., Flickering Gamma-Ray Flashes, the Missing Link between Gamma Glows and TGFs. Nature Letter, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07893-0 (2024)
Marisaldi, M., Østgaard, N., Lang, T., Sarria D., Mezentsev, A., et al. Highly dynamic gamma-ray emissions are common in tropical thunderclouds, Nature Letter, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07936-6 (2024)
Credit: «Artistic view of ALOFT observations» by University of Bergen / Mount Visual, licensed under CC BY 4.0
Groundbreaking Discoveries in Gamma-Ray Emissions from Thunderstorms
In the recent edition of Nature, groundbreaking results about the gamma-ray emissions produced during thunderstorms are presented. Overall, these findings reveal that gamma-ray emission from thunderclouds is much more complex, diverse, and dynamic than previously thought. Understanding these phenomena is crucial to uncovering the secrets of lightning.
Flickering Gamma-Ray Flashes: A New Discovery
Entitled “Flickering Gamma-Ray Flashes, the Missing Link between Gamma Glows and TGFs,” the paper by Østgaard et al. [2024] reports unique observations of a new phenomenon called Flickering Gamma-Ray Flashes (FGFs).
During thunderclouds, two different hard radiation phenomena have so far been known to originate: Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (TGFs) and gamma-ray glows. This third phenomenon, observed and named FGFs by Østgaard et al. [2024] resembles the other two, while at the same time revealing certain characteristics separating FGFs from the others. Most noteworthy may be that FGFs are pulses of gamma-rays not associated with any detectable optical or radio signals.
The Missing Link Found?
«We think that FGFs could be the missing link between TGFs and gamma-ray glows, whose absence has been puzzling the atmospheric electricity community for two decades», says lead author and Professor Nikolai Østgaard at the University of Bergen.
Dynamic Gamma-Ray Emissions in Tropical Thunderclouds
In another study presented in this edition of Nature, Marisaldi et al. [2024] focus on the phenomenon referenced above and known as gamma-ray glows. The paper, entitled «Highly dynamic gamma-ray emissions are common in tropical thunderclouds», shows that contrary to what has been believed until now, tropical thunderclouds over ocean and coastal regions commonly emit gamma rays for hours over areas up to a few thousand square kilometers.
A New Understanding of Gamma-Ray Glows
«The dynamics of gamma-glowing thunderclouds starkly contradicts the former quasi-stationary picture of glows, and resembles that of a huge gamma-glowing boiling pot both in pattern and behavior», says Professor Martino Marisaldi at the University of Bergen.
The ALOFT Campaign
The groundbreaking results presented by Østgaard et al. [2024] and Marisaldi et al. [2024] are based on observations from the ALOFT (Airborne Lightning Observatory for FEGS and TGFs) campaign.
ALOFT, a collaboration between NASA and the University of Bergen, involved flying the NASA ER-2 aircraft from the MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, over tropical thunderstorms around the Gulf of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean in the summer of 2023. The payload included lightning detectors, gamma-ray scintillators, and a mix of passive and/ or active microwave sensors. A total of 10 flights were conducted above thunderclouds around Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Florida.
The ALOFT campaign was financed by the Research Council of Norway and led by Professor Nikolai Østgaard and Professor Martino Marisaldi from the University of Bergen, Timothy Lang (Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA), and Franzeska Becker (ER-2 Mission Management).
The instrumentation on Board ER-2 during the ALOFT campaign included:
Gamma-ray detectors UIB-BGO (PI: Nikolai Østgaard, UiB) and iStorm (PI: Eric Grove, NRL)
An optical instrument named FEGS (PI: Mason Quick, Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA)
Two electric field sensors known as EFCM (PI: Hugh Christian, University of Alabama, Huntsville) and LIP (PI: Christopher Schultz, Marshall Space Flight Center, NASA)
Four cloud characterization instruments: AMPR (PI: Timothy Lang, Marshall Flight Center, NASA), CRS and EXRAD (PI: Gerry Heymsfield, Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA), and CoSSIR (PI: Rachael Kroodsma, Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA)
The flight campaign was coordinated with ground-based radio observations managed by a large network of collaborators.
«Flickering Gamma-Ray Flashes, the Missing Link Between Gamma Glows and TGFs» by Østgaard et al. & «Highly dynamic gamma-ray emissions are common in tropical thunderclouds» by Marisaldi et al.
Article Publication Date
2-Oct-2024
Study links hurricanes to higher death rates long after storms pass
U.S. tropical cyclones, including hurricanes, indirectly cause thousands of deaths for nearly 15 years after a storm. Understanding why could help minimize future deaths from hazards fueled by climate change
Stanford University
New research reveals hurricanes and tropical storms in the United States cause a surge of deaths for nearly 15 years after a storm hits.
Official government statistics record only the number of individuals killed during these storms, which are together called “tropical cyclones.” Usually, these direct deaths, which average 24 per storm in official estimates, occur through drowning or some other type of trauma. But the new analysis, published October 2 in Nature, reveals a larger, hidden death toll in hurricanes’ aftermath.
“In any given month, people are dying earlier than they would have if the storm hadn’t hit their community,” said senior study author Solomon Hsiang, a professor of environmental social sciences at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. “A big storm will hit, and there’s all these cascades of effects where cities are rebuilding or households are displaced or social networks are broken. These cascades have serious consequences for public health.”
Hsiang and lead study author Rachel Young estimate an average U.S. tropical cyclone indirectly causes 7,000 to 11,000 excess deaths. All told, they estimate tropical storms since 1930 have contributed to between 3.6 million and 5.2 million deaths in the U.S. – more than all deaths nationwide from motor vehicle accidents, infectious diseases, or battle deaths in wars during the same period. Official government statistics put the total death toll from these storms at about 10,000 people.
Hurricane impacts underestimated
The new estimates are based on statistical analysis of data from the 501 tropical cyclones that hit the Atlantic and Gulf coasts from 1930 to 2015, and mortality rates for various populations within each state just before and after each cyclone. The researchers expanded on ideas from a 2014 study from Hsiang showing that tropical cyclones slow economic growth for 15 years, and on a 2018 Harvard study finding that Hurricane Maria caused nearly 5,000 deaths in the three months after the storm hit Puerto Rico – nearly 70 times the official government count.
“When we started out, we thought that we might see a delayed effect of tropical cyclones on mortality maybe for six months or a year, similar to heat waves,” said Young, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California Berkeley, where she began working on the study as a master’s student in Hsiang’s lab before he joined Stanford’s faculty in July 2024. The results show deaths due to hurricanes persist at much higher rates not only for months but years after floodwaters recede and public attention moves on.
Uneven health burdens
Young and Hsiang’s research is the first to suggest that hurricanes are an important driver for the distribution of overall mortality risk across the country. While the study finds that more than 3 in 100 deaths nationwide are related to tropical cyclones, the burden is far higher for certain groups, with Black individuals three times more likely to die after a hurricane than white individuals. This finding puts stark numbers to concerns that many Black communities have raised for years about unequal treatment and experiences they face after natural disasters.
The researchers estimate 25% of infant deaths and 15% of deaths among people aged 1 to 44 in the U.S. are related to tropical cyclones. For these groups, Young and Hsiang write, the added risk from tropical cyclones makes a big difference in overall mortality risk because the group starts from a low baseline mortality rate.
“These are infants born years after a tropical cyclone, so they couldn’t have even experienced the event themselves in utero,” Young said. “This points to a longer-term economic and maternal health story, where mothers might not have as many resources even years after a disaster than they would have in a world where they never experienced a tropical cyclone.”
Adapting in future hazard zones
The long, slow surge of cyclone-related deaths tends to be much higher in places that historically have experienced fewer hurricanes. “Because this long-run effect on mortality has never been documented before, nobody on the ground knew that they should be adapting for this and nobody in the medical community has planned a response,” Young said.
The study’s results could inform governmental and financial decisions around plans for adapting to climate change, building coastal climate resilience, and improving disaster management, as tropical cyclones are predicted to become more intense with climate change. “With climate change, we expect that tropical cyclones are going to potentially become more hazardous, more damaging, and they’re going to change who they hit,” said Young.
Toward solutions
Building on the Nature study, Hsiang’s Global Policy Laboratory at Stanford is now working to understand why tropical storms and hurricanes cause these deaths over 15 years. The research group integrates economics, data science, and social sciences to answer policy questions that are key to managing planetary resources, often related to impacts from climate change.
With mortality risk from hurricanes, the challenge is to disentangle the complex chains of events that follow a cyclone and can ultimately affect human health – and then evaluate possible interventions.
These events can be so separated from the initial hazard that even affected individuals and their families may not see the connection. For example, Hsiang and Young write, individuals might use retirement savings to repair property damage, reducing their ability to pay for future health care. Family members might move away, weakening support networks that could be critical for good health down the line. Public spending may shift to focus on immediate recovery needs, at the expense of investments that could otherwise promote long-run health.
“Some solutions might be as simple as communicating to families and governments that, a few years after you allocate money for recovery, maybe you want to think about additional savings for health care-related expenses, particularly for the elderly, communities of color, and mothers or expectant mothers,” Young said.
Mortality caused by tropical cyclones in the United States
Article Publication Date
2-Oct-2024
‘Cheeky’ discovery allows scientists to estimate your risk of dying using cells found in the mouth
New epigenetic clock based on easy-to-collect cheek cells accurately predicts mortality
Frontiers
We don’t all age at the same rate. But while some supercentenarians may age exceptionally slowly due to winning the genetics jackpot, a plethora of behavioral and lifestyle factors are known to speed up aging, including stress, poor sleep, poor nutrition, smoking, and alcohol. Since such environmental effects get imprinted on our genome in the form of epigenetic marks, it is possible to quantify molecular aging by characterizing the epigenome at prognostic genomic sites.
Over the past decade, scientists have developed several such ‘epigenetic clocks’, calibrated against chronological age and various lifestyle factors across large numbers of people. Most of these focused on DNA methylation in blood cells, which makes collection of samples onerous, as well as stressful for the patient. But earlier this year, scientists from the US developed a second-generation clock, called CheekAge, which is based on methylation data in easy-to-collect cells from inside the cheeks.
Now, in Frontiers in Aging, the team has shown for the first time that CheekAge can accurately predict the risk of mortality – and even if epigenetic data from another tissue is used as input.
“We also demonstrate that specific methylation sites are especially important for this correlation, revealing potential links between specific genes and processes and human mortality captured by our clock,” said Dr Maxim Shokhirev, the study’s first author and Head of Computational Biology and Data Science at the company Tally Health in New York.
CheekAge had been developed or ‘trained’ by correlating the fraction of methylation at approximately 200,000 sites with an overall score for health and lifestyle, reflecting presumed differences in physiological aging.
The biological clock is ticking
In the present study, Shokhirev and colleaguesused statistical programming to see how well it predicted mortality from any cause in 1,513 women and men, born in 1921 and 1936 and followed throughout life by the Lothian Birth Cohorts (LBC) program of the University of Edinburgh. One of the LBC’s aims was to link differences in cognitive aging to lifestyle and psychosocial factors and biomedical, genetic, epigenetic, and brain imaging data. Every three years, the volunteers had their methylome in blood cells measured at approximately 450,000 DNA methylation sites. The last available methylation time point was used along with the mortality status to calculate CheekAge and its association with mortality risk. Data on mortality had been obtained from the Scottish National Health Service Central Register.
“[Our results show that] CheekAge is significantly associated with mortality in a longitudinal dataset and outcompetes first-generation clocks trained in datasets containing blood data,” concluded the authors.
Specifically, for every increase by a single standard deviation in CheekAge, the hazard ratio of all-cause mortality increased by 21%. This means that CheekAge is strongly associated with mortality risk in older adults.
“The fact that our epigenetic clock trained on cheek cells predicts mortality when measuring the methylome in blood cells suggests there are common mortality signals across tissues,” said Shokhirev.
“This implies that a simple, non-invasive cheek swab can be a valuable alternative for studying and tracking the biology of aging.”
Strongest predictors
The researchers looked at those methylation sites which were most strongly associated with mortality in greater detail. Genes located around or near these sites are potential candidates for impacting lifespan or the risk of age-related disease. For example, the gene PDZRN4, a possible tumor suppressor, and ALPK2, a gene implicated in cancer and heart health in animal models. Other genes that stood out had previously been implicated in the development of cancer, osteoporosis, inflammation, and metabolic syndrome.
“It would be intriguing to determine if genes like ALPK2 impact lifespan or health in animal models,” said Dr Adiv Johnson, the study’s last author and the Head of Scientific Affairs and Education at Tally Health.
“Future studies are also needed to identify what other associations besides all-cause mortality can be captured with CheekAge. For example, other possible associations might include the incidence of various age-related diseases or the duration of ‘healthspan’, the period of healthy life free of age-related chronic disease and disability.”
CheekAge, a next-generation epigenetic buccal clock, is predictive of mortality in human blood
Article Publication Date
1-Oct-2024
COI Statement
MNS, DJK, TLC, and AAJ are all current or former full-time employees of the company Tally Health and have no other conflicts of interest to declare. JC and SRC have no conflicts of interest to declare
Radon, even at levels below EPA guideline for mitigation, is linked to childhood leukemia
Oregon State University
CORVALLIS, Ore. – A study of more than 700 counties across multiple U.S. states found a link between childhood leukemia and levels of decaying radon gas, including those lower than the federal guideline for mitigation.
The findings are important because there are few established risk factors for cancer in children and the role of the environment has not been explored much, said Oregon State University’s Matthew Bozigar, who led the research.
Radon, a naturally occurring gas, is a product of the radioactive decay of uranium, which is present in certain rocks and soils. Upon escaping from the ground, radon itself decays and emits radioactive particles that can get within the body and collect in many tissues, where they can damage or destroy the cells’ DNA, which can cause cancer.
Odorless, tasteless and colorless, radon gas dilutes quickly in open air and is generally harmless before it decays, but indoors or in areas with poor air exchange, it can easily concentrate to dangerous levels and is recognized as a significant risk factor for lung cancer.
Radon, measured with small, passive detectors and mitigated through passive or active ventilation in basements and crawl spaces, has not been linked to other cancers, according to the World Health Organization. But in an 18-year statistical modeling study of 727 counties spread among 14 states, Bozigar and collaborators not only found a connection between childhood leukemia and radon, but at concentrations below the Environmental Protection Agency’s recommended guideline for mitigation.
Becquerels per cubic meter is a unit for expressing the concentration of radioactive decay in a given volume of air. The EPA says no level of radon is safe and advises that mitigation efforts be taken when radon concentration reaches 148 becquerels per cubic meter; the study considered concentrations as low as half of that.
“This is the largest study of its kind in the U.S., but more robust research is necessary to confirm these findings on an individual level and inform decision-making about health risks from radon in this country and globally,” said Bozigar, an assistant professor in the OSU College of Health.
Leukemia, the most common cancer in children, affects the blood and bone marrow. About 3,000 new cases of childhood leukemia – defined in the study and by the National Institutes of Health as involving patients up to age 19 – are diagnosed in the United States each year, according to the NIH. The annual incidence rate is 4.8 cases per 100,000 children.
Boys are more likely to receive a leukemia diagnosis than girls, but the research suggests radon increases the likelihood of leukemia in both sexes.
“Our study design only allows us to identify statistical associations and to raise hypotheses, so studies that can better determine whether radon exposure causes childhood leukemia are needed,” Bozigar said.
Counties examined in this study were in the states of Washington, California, Idaho, Utah, New Mexico Iowa, Louisiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Georgia, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The counties are those that during the study period reported their cancer data to the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results registry, a program that collects and analyzes cancer information. Known as SEER, the registry is supported by the National Cancer Institute.
Collaborating with Bozigar were scientists from the National Cancer Institute, Harvard University and Imperial College London. The research, funded in part by the Environmental Protection Agency, was published in Science of the Total Environment.
For Bozigar, the research has its roots in personal experience. He grew up in Portland, which has pockets of high radon levels, and noticed what seemed to be a high incidence of cancer, particularly in younger age groups. There were multiple cancer diagnoses among his own family and friends.
“As an epidemiologist, I started considering possible environmental causes and connected with awesome collaborators who provided important data and other resources to enable innovative new analyses,” he said. “We are working on many different radon studies, and we are continuing to find harmful effects not limited to the lungs in adults. We will have more to share in the coming months and years as our studies are published.”
A human rights-based approach to coral reef protection could ensure governments are held to account for safeguarding marine ecosystems and empower local and Indigenous communities to demand sustainable solutions and climate justice, a new study suggests.
An estimated one billion people rely on healthy coral reefs globally for food security, coastal protection and income from tourism and other services. If reefs and their ecosystems are lost, the impact on human health and economic wellbeing would be catastrophic.
Lead author, Dr Emma Camp from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), said the window of opportunity to conserve coral reefs is rapidly closing and despite numerous protective measures, coral reefs around the world continue to degrade.
“2024 marks the fourth global coral bleaching event impacting more than 50% of the world’s coral reefs, as well as other stressors such as pollution. This is an urgent reminder that the loss of coral ecosystems negatively impacts both humans and nonhumans,” said Dr Camp.
“Implementing coral reef conservation through a human rights-based approach will provide a practical path towards a much-needed transformation of local, national, and international governance, while also highlighting the human side of coral loss,” she said.
The article, Coral reef protection is fundamental to human rights, published in the journal Global Change Biology, is a cross-disciplinary collaboration with School of Law, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, University of Konstanz, and UTS experts in law and science.
In 2022 the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment was affirmed by the United Nations General Assembly. Human rights globally are under threat from intensifying climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss.
Professor Christian Voolstra, a co-author and the elected President of the International Coral Reef Society said: “The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report stated with high confidence that even at 1.5 °C warming, a mark that we might have already missed, the majority of warm-water coral-dominated systems will be quasi non-existent.
“We consequently need to think differently about reef conservation and how we fast-track to try and protect these critical ecosystems for current and future generations."
“In other fields, applying a human-rights based approach to environmental protection has advanced both social and environmental conservation,” said co-author Dr Genevieve Wilkinson from UTS Law, a founder of the Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Network.
“A rights-based approach embeds non-discrimination, empowerment and participation so that litigation is not the only available avenue for participation and empowerment of vulnerable rightsholders. States must be accountable to obligations to protect human rights and find just solutions.
“A human rights-based approach to coral reef protection is an important opportunity to expedite reef protection while simultaneously advancing climate justice for humans and non-humans,” said Dr Wilkinson.
The study highlights the 2022 decision in Billy v. Australia, which was the first successful climate litigation framed through the language of rights before this body.
“The case was submitted by a group of eight Torres Strait Islanders, and six of their children. It demonstrates how states’ failure to effectively address climate change can threaten the human rights of low-lying reef nation inhabitants who rely on healthy coral reefs to ensure their way of life.
“Coral bleaching and its damaging impact on crayfish habitats were specifically identified as a harmful climate change impact by the Human Rights Committee,” said Dr Wilkinson.
“The Committee determined that failure to implement adequate climate change adaptation measures by the Australian Government violated the Torres Strait Islander inhabitants’ rights to culture and to private and family life, contrary to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,” she said.
The triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution has been described by the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Human Rights as the greatest future challenge facing human rights globally.
Maersk has reported significant progress in bridging the longstanding gender gap of its workforce. Through its Equal at Sea initiative in India, Maersk’s Indian female cadets have increased from 41 in 2021 to over 350 this year. Overall, the percentage of women cadets in this year’s intake went up to 45% in the nautical and engineering streams, significantly improving the diversity within Maersk’s seafarers population in India. In addition, this milestone has brought the company closer to its 2027 target of equal gender representation amongst its cadet intake.
Maersk launched the Equal at Sea initiative in 2022, targeting the Indian market. The primary objective is to achieve gender equality among Maersk’s seafarers and address historical underrepresentation of women in the maritime industry. A 2022 study by IMO and the Women’s International Shipping& Trading Association (WISTA) noted that women account for only 29 percent of the overall workforce in the general maritime industry. The number for women seafarers is even smaller, with just two percent of around two million seafarers worldwide being women. An update to this data is expected next year when IMO and WISTA publish the results of the 2024 Women in Maritime survey.
“Through our initiatives, we have successfully inspired more women in India to choose seafaring as a career. Getting to 45 percent has been a great team effort within Maersk and across the industry. Now is the time to keep the momentum and ensure that the women recruited are also retained in the fleet,” said Karan Kochhar, Head of Marine People, Asia, Maersk.
The success of the Equal at Sea program in India comes with a significant impact for Maersk’s global progress in improving gender diversity. The number of women seafarers in the Maersk fleet has more than doubled, from 295 in 2021 to over 650 in 2024. This has seen the percentage of women in Maersk’s global seafarer pool rise from 2.3 percent in 2022 to 5.5 percent in 2024.
